The Chace Center wing of RISD’s Museum of Art (left of center), on North Main Street

Photo by David Brussat

PROVIDENCE’S latest example of modern architecture opens on Saturday to great fanfare. No doubt most who will attend its dedication have already convinced themselves that the Rhode Island School of Design got what it paid for.

Pity them. They have The Headache.

“[O]ur plutocrats, bureaucrats, board chairmen, CEOs, commissioners and college presidents . . . are willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one’s bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture. And why? They can’t tell you. They look up at the barefaced buildings they have bought, those great hulking structures they hate so thoroughly, and they can’t figure it out themselves. It makes their heads hurt.”

That passage, from Tom Wolfe’s 1981 book From Bauhaus to Our House, is what’s going on inside the heads of most people on the stage, and those in the seats as well, many of whom donated money to the project. They deserve their headaches.

Some have no headache because they swallowed the modernist Kool-Aid long ago. But their facial muscles grow weary of maintaining the wide grins that disguise their disappointment. They worry that they will not get to see this building on respectable magazine covers. (Do not despair: Editors care more about an architect’s fame than his work.)

The new wing of the RISD Museum of Art, called the Chace Center, mixes “etched” glass and brick in a plain composition. The design by José Rafael Moneo, of Spain, fits squarely into the city’s history of modern architecture. Like the GTECH building and most of its ilk here of late, it lacks the stylistic exclamation aficionados yearn to see. In short, the Chace Center is conservative. A 4-year-old could have made something more interesting with blocks.

The only work of modernism built in Providence over the past quarter century that succeeds on its own modernist terms is Old Stone Square. According to legend, it was designed purposely to displease the same class of people who will have a headache at Saturday’s dedication — who long since learned to take it like a man (or, rather, like a person).

Moneo’s Chace Center is boxy and unimaginative. It is really two boxes, a square box of etched glass sitting atop a flat brick box with a plate-glass window that turns the corner to a side plaza where one finds the door. A solitary window in the brick wall extending from the upper glass box to the rear of the plaza fails to rescue the wall from its new status as the most painfully tedious façade in Providence. The brick looks too orange, too prefabricated, and it feels almost as plasticky as the etched glass looks — which is just like aluminum siding.

In its “conversation” with the Metcalf Building, which was erected by RISD in 1915 and faces the Chace Center across the plaza, the masterpiece by Moneo has absolutely nothing to say. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said “less is more.” “Less is a bore” was Robert Venturi’s devastating riposte.

The early 20th Century Viennese architectural theorist Adolf Loos called ornament a crime in his 1908 book Ornament and Crime. But Loos got it backwards, and if lack of ornament is the crime (as the science of perception increasingly seems to suggest), then the Chace Center, like a dullard at a party, warrants a long stretch behind bars.

Moneo won the Pritzker Prize for buildings that displayed his alleged talent for working in historical contexts. He works in historical contexts the same way a bomb does, which is probably why he won the Pritzker. Some say his use of brick in the Chace Center helps it fit into the historical context of North Main Street. These people, to speak kindly, are deluding themselves. It’s not just the degree of difference. The classical bank of marble next to the Chace Center is as different from its brick neighbors as it is from the Chace Center. Yet the bank expresses its difference through architectural manners that evolved over the centuries to promote harmony.

North Main is the oldest street in Providence. It is a canvas by architects who knew how to paint cities over time. The Chace Center is not about the city but about the ego. It is graffiti, and like graffiti it struts its stuff by slashing the work of real artists.

The Chace Center was built on a parking lot, but the façades of the buildings facing the lot formed an ensemble of brick gables and rectangles that could enchant the eye from across the river. A stroll around the Chace Center reveals how much more artful the parking lot was than what now occupies it.

Most deplorable is the clunky roof’s disruption of College Hill’s broad horizon of gables, steeples and towers as seen from the distance. The Chace Center was originally supposed to glow in the dark. Penny pinching rescued the city from that calamity.

RISD had intended to achieve the sort of “higher profile” that Brown achieved with its towering Science Library. Hello! Is anybody home? Both poke a thumb in the eye of Providence, but at least Brown erected its eyesore before its hurtfulness was widely understood. (Brown has not learned its lesson.) The Chace Center’s bad manners are intentional.

This sounds like a harsh indictment, and it is, but at least the Chace Center does faithfully reflect the relationship between contemporary art and society, which is one of misunderstanding and distrust.

May RISD enjoy its $34 million headache.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).